


Little Less Bark, Little More Bite

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: M/M, Phone Sex, Season 5 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 13:46:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15171998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: My friends made me publish this even though I wrote it almost completely while buzzed on cooking wine.  Happy Fourth of July, y'all.





	Little Less Bark, Little More Bite

**Author's Note:**

> My friends made me publish this even though I wrote it almost completely while buzzed on cooking wine. Happy Fourth of July, y'all.

Tony can’t tell him where he is, not right now, but he’s alive.

"I'm all good, the cement was a diversion. Pretty bitching right? I needed to vanish for a little while, it's just some drama."

This all comes out in a rush, a strange mechanical whirring sound in the background. Gob has the strangest memory when he hears Tony’s voice on the other side. It’s of Michael, the day he left George-Michael with Gob so he could go see Tracy in the hospital. The night that he came home and he didn’t have a Tracy anymore.

He crouched down and held his son’s shoulders and forced a smile, and spoke in the same rushed voice. _Everything’s fine, I’ll be back really soon, okay? Mom and I are just going to talk for awhile._

“I gotta run, but I’ll catch you later, we’ll hook up.”

Gob is a great liar. Masters can always pick out a lesser craftsmen.

This is the first call.

* * *

Four days later, Gob is lying flat on his back on the floor of his most recent yacht, hugging an empty bottle of vodka to his chest.

Okay, so he doesn’t technically own _this_ vessel, and neither does his family. He used to see the McGregors around the marina all the time, though, and knows they spend their summers in Boca Raton on a bigger boat. They won’t mind giving him a place to crash, a place to dump his expensive bottles that used to be full of more expensive liquor. A place to hide from Newport Beach and anyone at the 2nd of July parade and his family.

He only wants to see one person. And that night, he wakes up to a buzzing on his stomach, where he dropped his phone when he dozed off wine drunk a few hours before.

“Tony!” You came back. No one comes back.  _I_ never come back.

“Hey man, sorry for going AWOL, things have been kind of crazy. Did I see John Beard say your family is getting arrested or something?”

“I don’t know, probably,” Gob pushes himself up onto his elbows, pressing the left one hard against the floor to hold his phone against his ear. “You know how families are. Where are you watching TV, where are you?”

Tony pauses, exhales through his nose. “I can’t say right now, there’s this whole thing with Sally–“

Something hot, jealous stings in Gob’s stomach, squeezing his intestines. “Are you fucking her?”

“You jealous?” Some part of Gob’s brain, the feeble part in the front that’s not completely paralyzed by booze, tells him Tony is changing the subject, trying to distract him. But the rest of it is needy and drunk and stripped down to its barest id, the strange part of Gob that always wants to tell the truth.

“I had a really good time with you, Tony, and then I find out, on my own cell phone, that you’re running around with women, she’s not even that hot, Michael was into her and he only likes dogs.”

“I don’t run around, I _attract._ People of all genders are interested in the gay magician, that’s why it’s such a perfect act.” Tony says. “You know what it’s like, sometimes you’re in the mood for chocolate ice cream, sometimes vanilla.” Gob doesn’t respond, and Tony must sense his confusion, because he amends, “it’s a metaphor, sometimes the chocolate is guys, the vanilla is women.”

“...You’re only into black guys?” Gob frowned.

“What? No. I-Why is this so hard? You never been with a guy before or something?” Tony tosses the sentences away, like it’s nothing, like Gob’s breath doesn’t stop. He wonders if you can _hear_ someone going red through the phone.

“I-“ His throat catches any words that might have followed, not that there were many in the offing.

“Oh. Shit.” The laughter in Tony’s voice dissipates.

The knee-jerk panic, the urge to snap at him and direct attention away from the implication he is anything other than straight dissipates. It’s not as strong as it used to be. “Look, I’ve had a lot of awesome sex! Excuse me if I can’t keep track of every-every single thing I do!”

The forced hearty laughter at overtakes the ends of his sentences does not seem to have changed with his recent self-actualization.

“Really?” Tony doesn’t really say the world like a question. He stretches it out between his teeth, plays with it like a cat its prey. _Realllllyyy._ “I was your first. Huh.”

You were _not_ , Gob almost spits, but again the rubber-band snap his retorts usually move as are coming slower, shakier. “It was… good, though, right?”

Tony chuckles, and God, when did Gob start finding other people’s _laughs_ sexy? He’s falling apart. “It was a fun night.”

“What-what would you do if you were here, if-if you didn’t have to hide?” Gob’s laughing too hard again, and the silence on the line after he quiets down almost makes him throw up; did Tony just hang–

“I’d get you on your back,” Tony says, and Gob’s mouth goes completely dry. “You’re a really big guy, I don’t think you notice how tall you are.”

“I can reach basically any shelf,” Gob says softly. He drops back down off his arms, lets his free hand press flat against his stomach.

“I like you on the ground, though. I like when you’re...manageable.” Tony straddled him, pressed down on him and pinned him in place, that night. _That first night,_ he thinks automatically, his mind already stitching together some vague someday when Tony would be here, rocking gently with the waves, touching Gob.

Gob slid his hand down from his stomach, dipping his fingers under his boxers’ waistband. “I’m a lot to manage.”

“Hey that’s my line,” Tony cracks, but his breathing comes heavier over the airwaves. For a minute they just inhaled, exhaled together.

Gob closes his eyes, idly presses his palm against his cock, which is interested, if not fully erect yet. He feels his heart beating against his ribs, wonders if Tony’s was beating the same. It’s not scared this time, not like–

“I’d get my dick in you,” Tony blurts out. Gob’s heart suddenly moves much faster. “You took it so good last time, didn’t you Gobie?”

“Yeah,” Gob’s voice cracks, like he’s fourteen, and he wants to melt through the floor, into the ocean. That must be why his face flames so suddenly. His palm curls into a fist, wrapped around his cock, stroking himself, his face getting even warmer. He remembers, his legs bent and hiked up, knees brushing his own stomach. How it stung at first, a sharp pain and the smell of latex.

“I’d fuck you so good,” the words seem to be more confident now, Tony’s usual smirking voice, the one that made Gob’s stomach flutter, was back in his ear. “You’d be begging for it.”

“I was… so full.” The pressure had been incredible, the feeling he knew could never be replicated by his fingers or a toy from a seedy shop in West Hollywood. The stinging faded, replaced with rhythm, of rocking with Tony’s thrusts into him, his hands gripping his back. “I wanna touch you again, not tight enough to cut you with my nails. I’m not a psycho.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Just to hang on.”

Tony’s face, Tony’s green eyes above him. The the way he laughed when Gob reached up and grabbed onto his hair a little too tight. But not a mean laugh. Gob didn’t realize until that moment it was the first time he’d ever heard a nice laugh.

Gob’s hand stutters, his chin pressed hard into his chest. “Then… could you kiss me?”

The line crackles. Gob breathes deep, savoring the moment, in case it’s the last one he gets in this hazy blur of both his heart and his cock feeling turned on, before reality slams down on them again.

“Yeah.” Tony clicks his tongue. “Duh. You kiss like a drowning man, Bluth.”

Gob strokes himself faster now, relieved, but his eyebrow hitches. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I’m not sure,” Tony gasps, the only sign that he’s coming too, in whatever dark corner of the world he hid in. “It sounded good. I guess like you get _into it,_ like you think it’s–”

“–gonna save me.” Maybe finishing each other’s sentence was like being same, maybe it was the next level of same, where they jerk off almost in sync, separated by telephone wire. Come alone, together.

And then they’re breathing again, harder than before. And Gob hears a click and the line goes dead.

This is the second call.

* * *

Four _weeks_ later, the sun is breaking over the marina, and Gob is dehydrated and blurry-eyed and cradling his phone. He's been living on booze and take out, ignoring calls from his little brothers, from the Orange County Sheriff's Office, even a few stray ones from someone named S. Sitwell. But this one. This one gets answered.

“Hey,” Tony says, and Gob can hear a sound he’s heard almost every night of his life, a sound that lulls babies of southern California to sleep due to its sheer normalcy.

The ocean, moving and swirling. Gulls cawing in the sky. The knocking of bells against ropes, tying boats to the pier.

It’s the same sound he’s hearing right now.

“You wanna have a second time?”

“Third,” Gob responds, because he’s not about to let Tony get away with lying, with calling their night on the phone nothing.

“Okay,” Tony says, and Gob hears his voice in two places at once. “A third time.”

This is the last call.


End file.
